Open Hardware/Modding/Retro

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 18, 2022

• Qualcomm talks up RISC-V, roasts 'legacy architecture'

• The Little Engineer That Could

  Things have improved a little, since writing PART 1 of my experience. Instead of a patched bflb-mcu-tool to flash, it is now possible to use a modified picoprobe with the Dev Cube flashing tool.

• "The Sidecar" -- Adding advanced networking, and a Linux shell, to a Psion palmtop

  I am a huge fan of finding creative ways of using the serial port on older computers to get them On-Line — and otherwise extend their functionality.

  One of my favorite such approaches is using a single board computer to emulate an old-school, analog modem… bridged to a WiFi connection. This allows an old computer — even ones which never had a networking stack — to use any plain old telecom software (the kind you might use to dial up a BBS in the 1980s) to connect to a Telnet or SSH server.

• the keyboard controller

  It's tragic how the modern PC has put us into this situation, where we no longer have control or even visibility into the working of core, privileged components of our computers---components running software that could potentially be malicious. By the modern PC I do, of course, mean the IBM PC of 1981.

  I don't want to belabor this post with much background, but if you are quite new to the world of computer history I will briefly state one of the field's best-known facts: for reasons that are ultimately more chance than logic, the original IBM PC established many de facto standards that are still used in computers today. "PC compatibles," in the 1980s meaning computers that could run software targeted originally at the IBM PC, had to duplicate its architecture rather exactly. The majority of modern computers, with Apple products as a partial exception, are directly descended from these PC compatibles and are thus strongly influenced by them.

• The Tandy Zoomer -- The x86 PDA before the Palm Pilot

  The 1996 release of the first Palm Pilot was, in the minds of many, the first truly successful launch of a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). But the seeds of the Palm Pilot were planted several years earlier.

  In fact the company behind the Palm Pilot, “Palm Computing Inc.”, was founded back in 1992 for the sole purpose of creating software for another just released PDA… the Tandy Zoomer.

• BBC Micro:Bit As Handheld Synthesizer

  The BBC Micro:bit, while not quite as popular in our community as other microcontroller development boards, has a few quirks that can make it a much more interesting piece of hardware to build a project around than an Arduino. [Turi] took note of these unique features and decided that it was the perfect platform to build a synthesizer on.

• 'He's more machine now than mannequin' - repairing Darth Vader with a Micro:bit - Terence Eden’s Blog

  I thought about trying to fill it in and sand it down - but I don't have the skills for that. But I can rebuild him - I have the technology.

  I wanted something with blinkenlights - to match the original 1970s æsthetic. And something a little playful. So I dug out my old micro:bit!